One of the great things about SAP is that, even though we think about SAP in terms of the state-of-the-art software for the largest companies and consultancies, there are actually all kinds of roles to play in the SAP market and to me, without getting too misty eyed, this is the stuff that dreams are made of. You can find a role in SAP that really fits your skills and lifestyle. I have seen it many times, consultants get some projects under their belt and they start to get the entrepreneurial bug a little bit, sometimes it just starts by wanting to maximize your bill rate, but eventually, this has led a lot of consultants to the process of building very successful services and consulting firms that have made a large impact on the SAP community. This presentation talks about some of the next steps and how to do that. Of course, the transitions involved here are not always easy. I think about my own career transitions from an SAP recruiter to running services firms to my more dreamier role that I am pursuing now as an analyst helping other firms to grow, and this has sort of been my end goal, but I have had a lot of humbling moments and stumbles along the way and hopefully those have consolidated in some lessons learned that we can all share with you today.

Becoming an independent consultant is not necessarily an easy thing to do and to this day I know consultants who never did take that leap and have had regrets about it, and it is a leap, and whenever you take a leap in your career you do tend to feel a little bit of a breeze, but there are ways of minimizing the risk and that involves coming up with the right strategy and having the right resources at your disposal and that is what we are going to talk about today. The really good news, for aspiring SAP consultants, is that in today's SAP ecosystem, it is very, very different than the mid-90s when I first started helping consultants become independent and they were really out there on their own. Now there is an SAP ecosystem, an amazing community to draw on, and I believe that SAP's online communities are at the heart of this ecosystem and I really believe in what SAP has done with those communities as well as what they are doing with SDN Subscriptions and that is why I agreed to do this presentation today.